


Working the Night Shift

by HanniballisticMissile



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: #vampirehannibalfest, Anal Sex, Biting, Blood Drinking, Bottom Hannibal Lecter, Bottom Will Graham, Halloween, M/M, Oral Sex, Porn With Plot, Rimming, Top Hannibal Lecter, Top Will Graham, Vampire Hannibal Lecter, Vampire Sex, Vampires, vampirehannibalfest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-07
Updated: 2018-10-07
Packaged: 2019-07-27 17:18:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16223717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HanniballisticMissile/pseuds/HanniballisticMissile
Summary: The man living above Will's apartment is a tornado of chaos. His nightly pandemonium is intolerable. If only he wasn't so gorgeous, Will might have confronted him by now...If only he wasn't so gorgeous, Will might not have invited him over the threshold.





	Working the Night Shift

**Author's Note:**

  * For [emilytrik](https://archiveofourown.org/users/emilytrik/gifts).



His name is Hannibal Lecter, and Will knows this. He knows that Lecter works the night shift—that he goes out late, and comes back early. And Will knows that, since his moving to the apartment above, he has been assiduously hounded by insomnia.

It claws its Cerberus paws at his skull. Clefts the aching throb of his homely sanctum in two.

There has been no peace since Hannibal Lecter came to town.

It’s not the nightmares—present as they are in his numbed emotional stasis—which he finds unendurable. Will can receive nightmares and reform them into art. That has always been his way.

But Christ, _the noise_. It gets to him. Grabs him by the throat. Shakes him into wakefulness at midnight; three, four in the morning; or whatever other time Hannibal gets back from his sporadic spells of employment.

The dragging movement of boxes across hardwood floor; the clanking of metal; a thumping furniture heaviness. You’d almost think he was dragging bodies.

At first, the thought makes Will laugh.

Then, it darkens into foulness.

Murder is no excuse for rudeness.

Or, at least, that is what Will plans to tell Hannibal on the Thursday evening, before he leaves for work.

 _If_ he can manage to hold out until then.

* * *

Will doesn’t hold out until then.

On Tuesday evening, 30th October at approximately eleven o’clock in the state of Baltimore, Maryland, Will Graham walks up the small flight of stairs to his neighbour’s apartment. There, he knocks upon the door twice, immediately ringing the doorbell three times.

The sounds emanating from the flat cease temporarily, then start back up.

According to a Mrs. Jacqueline Robinson, an elderly witness renting the flat above, it is roughly about this hour in which she hears the aforementioned Mr. Graham, in a questioning tone, proclaim from the landing: “ _Hannibal?_ ”

Nine hours later, on the road to Wolf Trap, Virginia, local man Elias Winstrap will take his morning stroll.

The body that his Alsatian hound will find is brutalised, not accidentally. Human, not animal.

His name is Will Graham.

He is thirty-seven years old.

* * *

“Hannibal?”

There is no light under the door. But Will knows Hannibal can hear him. Somebody can, at least.

The noise halts. Resumes again.

Will bangs his head against the door, frustrated; lowers his tone to a seething whisper: “Fine, don’t answer. _Rude_. Fucking rude. I work full time too, you know?”

There is no reply.

For a moment, Will imagines heavy breathing at the door; an eye at the peephole, observing his dishevelled, sleepless state.

It is not a wholly unwanted thought; nor an entirely unwarranted one. Hannibal possesses an ethereal grace; a strange and bewitching darkness. There is an elegance to the jut of his cheekbones, to the hollowed out pale of his throat; a gorgeousness which lingers in the steady blink of those caramel lashes.

Will swallows. Shakes off the warmth of his musings. Storms back into his flat, and is gone.

At the door, a golden eye blinks once—more from habit than need—and retreats back into darkness.

* * *

Half an hour later, sat at his table cradling fragrant tea with scratched palms, Will hears the doorbell ring. He hesitates, a dreaded churning in his gut, a terrible guilt stalking his lungs.

Behind that door, Hannibal Lecter—pale as marbled Dionysus, foppishly alluring—leans his weight against the banister.

Will exhales. Opens the door. Meets the burnt chestnut gaze with a blue-flame smoulder.

“Hello,” they say, in unison.

Hannibal smiles, fangs glinting, radiating pleasure as if it held a physical presence. A cloying thickness languishes heavy between shared distances. His is the sort of honey which lures flies in, sugary and bright; gluing iridescent wings and stealing the escape from right out under them.

Coincidentally, it is precisely this kind of saccharine stickiness that Will craves, lonely as he is.

“First of all,” Hannibal begins, “I want to apologise about the noise.”

Will nods, blankly.

“Secondly—”

“Why don’t you come in?” Will asks, abrupt. “The kettle just boiled, and well…”

Hannibal looks taken aback. Then, flattered.

He assesses Will, and Will, in turn, allows himself to be assessed. Tousled ringlets; purpled veins; the coy arc of pallid throat.

“Thank you,” Hannibal says, all politeness, and steps over the threshold.

The fly goes to his willing end for food; the deer leaps down impossible ravines to escape the danger of pursuit. Will Graham invites the spider into his house, and allows it to weave the web of his own demise.

For Hannibal alone, he will do this.

And for Will, Hannibal might just let him.

* * *

There is a beauty in his stride; in the way he makes his coffee. Each rough movement is a song to aesthetics. The heaped spoon, irreverently handled: an art form. The cup set down quietly: a Panglossian _vanitas_.

This is what Hannibal sees in Will Graham, and what he knows to be true.

Hannibal’s concerns are wholly symmetrical. His hopes are uncannily lifeless. He takes the coffee in death-cold hands and warms it, burning, to his chest.

“Would you like some help?” Will asks him.

Yes, he would.

“Have you been unpacking all this time?”

Yes, he has.

And then, a glorious, radiant glance: “For a while there, I thought you must’ve been dragging dead bodies.”

“Imagine that,” Hannibal says, and smiles.

 _Delightful_.

“A little murder is no excuse for that commotion,” Will laughs, a pained grimace, and drinks his tea. “Must be difficult though: working the night shift.”

Not at all, Hannibal replies, easily charismatic. He loves the silent streets; the way the world moves softly in her sleeping state. Her ice cold roads and dismal orange lamplight; the cascading waterfall of the remote highway; a river of vehicles, passing back and forth over the melancholy tarmac.

He adores the organics of it, how the streets hold the fumes of generations, ghosts lingering in the fossil fumes, ancient and impermanent. Those dinosaur dreams of the early mornings, he adores more than anything. 

Will is enraptured by his words. Eats them up, slavishly.

No glamour needed for this adoration. No afterlife enchantment or persuasion.

Entirely simple. Entirely Will.

Hannibal eats him up with his eyes.

Then, when he has had enough of hypotheticals, he starts to play with his food.

* * *

The food plays back.

Will is desperate; touch-starved; full of fevered sweetness.

Hannibal corners him at the counter, and he blushes pink under kitchenette fluorescence.

Will doesn’t resist the teeth, claiming his mouth, pinning down his butterfly tongue. Doesn’t writhe in displeasure at the arctic fingers on his hips. Accepts graciously Hannibal’s violent paroxysms—his hitched up shirt and the unzipping of rigid heat.

There is no gentleness in this hunger: it is rough with the need of starvation.

He drinks down Hannibal’s fingers, glassy-eyed, and is mutely slammed into the cabinet. His groans are drowned out before even beginning.

Will bites down and draws blood. It is the sweetest dream he ever had: sucking Hannibal’s fingers; rubbing his aching wet cock against the coolness; having his back scratched to ruins from yearning.

Will begs. Pleads for it.

He wants it.

A sadist through and through, Hannibal lets him writhe. Sinks his wet fingers into velvet softness and draws out again.

Death has done nothing to improve Count Lecter’s cruelty.

He sucks a bite into the flushing skin, licking and touching until Will is spent, coming over the both of them, limbs heavy in the aftershock.

Will is picked up. Taken to bed. Opened, with a gasp, by glacial tonguing.

Sensitivity drives him into the mattress: gripping at his curls; biting his lips; fisting the blankets.

Hannibal lavishes his attentions, lapping cattishly, a predatory grin.

“Do you want it?” he asks, biting each cheek, gazing into black blown pupils.

“Oh God, _yes_ . Hannibal, _please_.”

Hannibal laughs, overjoyed, and doesn’t relent.

He kisses Will’s neck; sucks on his nipples; drags him back into painful hardness.

“Good, Will,” he praises, preserving the swollen heat of cock in his mouth, tasting the arc of his sticky thighs.

A strangled gasp, “So _cold_.”

And then, Hannibal is kissing his moans, pressing into him slowly, slowly, teasing the head of his cock into irresistible warmth.

He drags the tortured rawness of Will’s vocals back into use, feline impassiveness ironing the lines of his face, maintaining his conquest—angling deeper—clinging to control all whilst unsheathing his claws.

Baring his chest. Baring his fangs. He hits every sweet spot, and every spot is sweetness, too.

A Cimmerian monstrosity, raking his talons deep into Will Graham’s body, Hannibal just can’t resist.

He fucks him deep. Draws blood. Imbibes life itself.

 _That sound_ though; that hitched plea.

It drives him to orgasm once; twice; three times: a body unhindered by limits.

Will Graham, for his part, wraps fingers up in Hannibal’s hair, eyes wide and trusting.

Every fleeting touch is sacrilege; the aromatic ecstasy of sin.

Will wants to be good. So good.

He wants Hannibal to take everything.

So, he does.

He drinks Will’s heartbeat down. Drowns in his weakening pulse; his tempest gaze.

One litre. Two litres. Three. Four.

Leaves him catatonic, barely breathing, his fluttering lids blossoming into unconsciousness.

There are roads behind them—cold hard highways of night—paths Hannibal will never have the initiative to follow him through. They must span the length of galaxies, those asphalt lanes. Weightless as the cosmos, older than space itself.

Hannibal pulls away, re-buttoning spoilt lines of stale crispness, the damp encrustment of blood.

Will’s fingers, in their vice-like grip, take a while to unloose from flaxen strands of hair.

Gratuitously, Hannibal sighs. In secret though, he doesn’t mind it.

The vampire in him might even admit to being flattered.

* * *

As Will Graham is dying, Hannibal makes coffee.

Whilst the flush of Will’s cheeks shift from rose to alabaster, Hannibal is soothing his living body with flavour.

In these moments, he is reacquainted with rejuvenation—the senses of flesh—and thus is reborn in man’s image. He paces the place, curious and collected.

On Will’s nightstand: olanzapine, citalopram; half-empty plastic packets; aluminium cushioned.

He drinks his coffee, bitter and burning, acidic in his mouth, during this refractory period of numb sensation.

Will’s shelves hold Dante, Hoffmann, Ligotti. The coffee table holds notebooks, sprawling madly, a wild testament to preemptive death. He picks one up, reads it.

“ _Will Graham_ ,” Hannibal Lecter muses.

He likes the way it rolls off his tongue. Likes the amusing twist of it. The Lithuanian trill of the _R_.

But, most of all, he likes how Will Graham writes about him.

The clinking deviations of his night-time escapades are transformed, with subtle eroticism, and paired delicately to a slow build tension. The mysterious glint of his white teeth are declared poetry. His crazed noises dubbed as florid mystery. There is the gleaming of greatness in his phrase, waiting to be unturned and exploited by sticky editorial hands.

And all of it is centred on him.

Even before he knew Hannibal existed, Will was waiting for him. Armed only with his language and the blank canvas of passion, he calls out longingly for his unknown love. 

It remedies apathy. Unthaws the iciest of resolves.

Now, Hannibal is biting his lips: curious, questioning, hungry. This time, with a newer kind of hankering; a wholly foreign appetite.

In the bedroom opposite, Will Graham is dying. His pulse is blinder to sight than a newly-birthed lamb, eyes plucked clean by the crows.

Hannibal drinks his coffee; bides his time; hits the target of his own heartlessness with unquestioning gracefulness.

Will Graham is dying. 

_What’s to be done about that?_

* * *

His lids are caked with crumbling red. There is blood on his face, in his hair—an uncontrolled torrent of it. Dried semen on his thighs, under his nails—a memory as fleeting as love.

_It is not like the movies._

But Will doesn’t watch the movies anyway. Not since he became so lonesome. And that was a long time ago.

 _It is not like the movies._ And it isn’t—Hollywood was never this tasteless.

The phrase still sticks in his gullet though, slithers its way to his heart, settles inside tranquil lungs.

Will doesn’t bathe or dress. Doesn’t hunt for Hannibal or prey. He goes, wholly indecent, out into twinkling lights. Basks in orange stars and street lamps. Reaches for the phantasmagorical skies.

Surely it has not been but five minutes before he goes again, rippling entranced, off into a restless darkness.

Bare feet strike tarmac, and are gone.

* * *

Will Graham wakes up on the autopsy table.

Flies fizz amongst the garden of artificial light, batting their wings, marking their territory.

He picks the inside of his flesh, and draws out maggots. When the pathologist returns to the lab (and God love her, a pathologist’s work is never done) he picks out the inside of her flesh too. Draws out the scarlet and wipes his shameless mouth on it.

Will pushes off the table, stretching the column of his spine, and goes from gruesome yellow to vibrant pink in the time it takes to press on some slacks. In morgue blues, he walks out of the Department of Forensic Science, striding barefoot back onto black asphalt.

Perhaps, that is where he was always destined to be. Perhaps kismet kissed his lips, conferring nomadism.

But the dead heed no warnings from fate. And such forces, in their turn, spare them the hassle.

* * *

Thirty-seven years. Fifteen days. Twelve hours.

This is how long it takes for Will Graham to find Hannibal Lecter.

It is two am, downtown _Le Piagge_. Hannibal is long-haired and longer bearded, dressed in the shuffling rags of a down-and-out. Of all places, they meet under the glowing neon advert of a Florentine bus-stop. Hannibal rolls a cigarette in his wet mouth, offering one up to Will as he strolls by.

So, Will takes him up on the offer.

Coiled tendrils swirl, a space shuttle condensation of breath. They smoke in silence, and are very far from earth, looking down at marbled blues and greens: creator and created; maker and unmaker. Idling embers twirl out, scattering sycamore motions. Atoms heave to the disunion of decades.

When the light burns out, Will rakes his fists through Hannibal’s hair, slamming his tongue down his throat.

He pins him fast, like a fly.

Words are for later.

He fucks Hannibal against the glass, grimy and raw, their bodies leaving imprints against green luminescence.

And Hannibal allows it—even enjoys it—when Will thumbs his fingers into his ass; stretches him wide; rams inside him, palms lodged cold against his wrists.

He rolls back onto repurposed heat. Offers his neck up and delights in the sheer velocity of sensation. It is primal as any need—far more pressing than thirst.

A conjoining of souls.

The tide of bitter joy.

* * *

They lie on cheap sheets.

Before the sun rises, they shut the windows and pull back the curtains, wide enough to see the dawn move in, arrowed in golden pink.

The moon is carried on apocalypse wings. Stars seem something else entirely.

“Will…” Hannibal begins.

His clasps Will’s hand. Circles it tenderly. Sings his praises through paralleled pearls of sight.

“I know,” Will replies. “I already know.”

He has had this conversation many times, in the secret shell of his dreamless nights, pocketing them meticulously within the corners of his lonesome wanderings.

There is love and hate. Harsh questions and rugged answers. A thousand dead emotions, stripped back in the tsunami of time. Utterly meaningless, faced by this moment.

Hannibal sighs at the warm cusp of the sun.

“I was curious,” he explains.

And Will knows less than he ever did. But he knows this to be true.

On the streets below, bodies speed into oblivion, secret death wishes scratched into their movements. There is no meaning in it; only the constant fluctuations of dynamic space; the twining chase of the glacial highways.

Tomorrow, they will rise again. And tomorrow, and tomorrow.

For now though, they gaze into orange fluidity and rebirth. It sprawls like paradise; Eden regained.

The rising of suns.

The boulevard of morning.


End file.
